Woodworking Posts

I’m often asked about blocking on feet (sad, but true). Woodworkers want to know how bracket and ogee feet were attached and how to deal with cross-grain gluing. The answers to these questions are: lots of ways, and you don’t necessarily have to because they didn’t. Cross-grain gluing and consideration of expansion and contraction wasn’t a universal primary concern. Now, I know the first photo isn’t of feet, but it […]

The post Furniture Details: Feet appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

The difference between school and real life is that in real life the tests come first and then the lessons. This is especially true of woodworking; you never know how far you should take one step of a project until you are knee-deep in the next step. That’s when you realize you didn’t fuss enough and now have a painful correction to make, or that you fussed too much and […]

The post What Hand Planes are Good For appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Note: I started writing this blog entry more than a year ago. I shelved it and have revisited it several times since. Each time, I thought: I don’t need this kind of grief. For whatever reason (four beers, perhaps?), I offer this as an observation based on teaching students, both amateur and professional. For the last decade I’ve had the privilege of teaching woodworking students all over the world about […]

The post An Observation on Vintage Handplanes appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

DMT recently began offering what it calls the “Double-Sided Dia-Sharp 12″ MagnaBase System” — in other words, a two-sided diamond stone that attaches to a magnetic base. I haven’t yet had time to give it a thorough workout (I’ll report back after I do), but after touching up the edges on two plane blades and three chisels, I can report that it’s nice. The diamond stone, (available in extra-coarse/coarse and […]

The post Clever Magnetic Sharpening System appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

One of the hardest things I’ve tried to teach is good design. There are lots of architectural and mathematical rules that can be applied to proportions, but many pieces of furniture just don’t dovetail. Some pieces, like some chairs, don’t fit into a proportioning system. They are made using general rules – like seat height usually rages from 16″ to 18″ on most chairs used at tables (and tables tend […]

The post Design in Practice: Sack Back Windsors appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

My recent article on the new polissoirs from Don’s Barn and a long-term test of the burnishing effect from the tool had a significant error: The photo showed the wrong sample board. That similar-looking sample board was given to me by woodworker Steve Schafer – he’ll be blogging about the finishing schedule on that sample board in the near future. Last night I rooted through my wood rack to find […]

The post A Correction to my Entry on Polissoirs appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.